Agricultural Extension in Kenya: Practice and Policy Lessons

A consensus exists that extension services, if functioning effectively, improve agricultural productivity through providing farmers with information that helps them to optimize their use of limited resources. Variations in management practices and husbandry skills among small farmers in Kenya are very great. Tremendous poverty-reducing benefits could be reaped by bringing the production costs of the most inefficient farmers to mean productivity levels. Achieving these gains in maize production efficiency will depend on many factors, but extension is likely to be among the most important. Therefore, the costs to the nation of having an underperforming extension service – in terms of smallholder productivity, incomes, and poverty reduction, and the ability to survive or even thrive after the reduction in import tariffs as implied by impending COMESA and EAC trade agreements – are very high. The objective of this study is to assess the range of alternative food crop and livestock extension services currently operating in Kenya, what works, what doesn’t, and why. The report is fundamentally descriptive, providing knowledge on the nature of the existing extension providers, their characteristics, approaches employed and the challenges they face. Based on successful cases, we identify attributes that may be important for future discussions about extension service provision in Kenya and the role of the government in such a scenario. The study covered 16 districts representing the various agro-regional zones present in Kenya. It employed qualitative methods and focused on the private and public extension service providers. Discussions were also held with other stakeholder in the agricultural extension service realm about their experiences and perceptions of the existing extension systems and approaches. The study highlights five (6) important findings: (1) private extension provision is generally skewed towards well-endowed regions and high-value crops. Remote areas and po(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)